While vision-language-action models (VLAs) have shown promising robotic behaviors across a diverse set of manipulation tasks, they achieve limited success rates when deployed on novel tasks out of the box. To allow these policies to safely interact with their environments, we need a failure detector that gives a timely alert such that the robot can stop, backtrack, or ask for help. However, existing failure detectors are trained and tested only on one or a few specific tasks, while generalist VLAs require the detector to generalize and detect failures also in unseen tasks and novel environments. In this paper, we introduce the multitask failure detection problem and propose SAFE, a failure detector for generalist robot policies such as VLAs. We analyze the VLA feature space and find that VLAs have sufficient high-level knowledge about task success and failure, which is generic across different tasks. Based on this insight, we design SAFE to learn from VLA internal features and predict a single scalar indicating the likelihood of task failure. SAFE is trained on both successful and failed rollouts and is evaluated on unseen tasks. SAFE is compatible with different policy architectures. We test it on OpenVLA, $\pi_0$, and $\pi_0$-FAST in both simulated and real-world environments extensively. We compare SAFE with diverse baselines and show that SAFE achieves state-of-the-art failure detection performance and the best trade-off between accuracy and detection time using conformal prediction. More qualitative results and code can be found at the project webpage: https://vla-safe.github.io/

For robots to perform a wide variety of tasks, they require a 3D representation of the world that is semantically rich, yet compact and efficient for task-driven perception and planning. Recent approaches have attempted to leverage features from large vision-language models to encode semantics in 3D representations. However, these approaches tend to produce maps with per-point feature vectors, which do not scale well in larger environments, nor do they contain semantic spatial relationships between entities in the environment, which are useful for downstream planning. In this work, we propose ConceptGraphs, an open-vocabulary graph-structured representation for 3D scenes. ConceptGraphs is built by leveraging 2D foundation models and fusing their output to 3D by multi-view association. The resulting representations generalize to novel semantic classes, without the need to collect large 3D datasets or finetune models. We demonstrate the utility of this representation through a number of downstream planning tasks that are specified through abstract (language) prompts and require complex reasoning over spatial and semantic concepts. To explore the full scope of our experiments and results, we encourage readers to visit our project webpage.

Catastrophic forgetting has been a major challenge in continual learning, where the model needs to learn new tasks with limited or no access to data from previously seen tasks. To tackle this challenge, methods based on knowledge distillation in feature space have been proposed and shown to reduce forgetting [16, 17, 25 ]. However, most feature distillation methods directly constrain the new features to match the old ones, overlooking the need for plasticity. To achieve a better stability-plasticity trade-off, we propose Backward Feature Projection (BFP), a method for continual learning that allows the new features to change up to a learnable linear transformation of the old features. BFP preserves the linear separability of the old classes while allowing the emergence of new feature directions to accommodate new classes. BFP can be integrated with existing experience replay methods and boost performance by a significant margin. We also demonstrate that BFP helps learn a better representation space, in which linear separability is well preserved during continual learning and linear probing achieves high classification accuracy.

Despite the significant progress made by deep learning in natural image matting, there has been so far no representative work on deep learning for video matting due to the inherent technical challenges in reasoning temporal domain and lack of large-scale video matting datasets. In this paper, we propose a deep learning-based video matting framework which employs a novel and effective spatio-temporal feature aggregation module (ST-FAM). As optical flow estimation can be very unreliable within matting regions, ST-FAM is designed to effectively align and aggregate information across different spatial scales and temporal frames within the network decoder. To eliminate frame-by-frame trimap annotations, a lightweight interactive trimap propagation network is also introduced. The other contribution consists of a large-scale video matting dataset with groundtruth alpha mattes for quantitative evaluation and real-world high-resolution videos with trimaps for qualitative evaluation. Quantitative and qualitative experimental results show that our framework significantly outperforms conventional video matting and deep image matting methods applied to video in presence of multi-frame temporal information. Our dataset is available at https://github.com/nowsyn/DVM.

Pose estimation is a basic module in many robot manipulation pipelines. Estimating the pose of objects in the environment can be useful for grasping, motion planning, or manipulation. However, current state-of-the-art methods for pose estimation either rely on large annotated training sets or simulated data. Further, the long training times for these methods prohibit quick interaction with novel objects. To address these issues, we introduce a novel method for zero-shot object pose estimation in clutter. Our approach uses a hypothesis generation and scoring framework, with a focus on learning a scoring function that generalizes to objects not used for training. We achieve zero-shot generalization by rating hypotheses as a function of unordered point differences. We evaluate our method on challenging datasets with both textured and untextured objects in cluttered scenes and demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms previous methods on this task. We also demonstrate how our system can be used by quickly scanning and building a model of a novel object, which can immediately be used by our method for pose estimation. Our work allows users to estimate the pose of novel objects without requiring any retraining. Additional information can be found on our website https://bokorn.github.io/zephyr/

Abstract The model‐based investing using financial factors is evolving as a principal method for quantitative investment. The main challenge lies in the selection of effective factors towards excess market returns. Existing approaches, either hand‐picking factors or applying feature selection algorithms, do not orchestrate both human knowledge and computational power. This paper presents iQUANT, an interactive quantitative investment system that assists equity traders to quickly spot promising financial factors from initial recommendations suggested by algorithmic models, and conduct a joint refinement of factors and stocks for investment portfolio composition. We work closely with professional traders to assemble empirical characteristics of “good” factors and propose effective visualization designs to illustrate the collective performance of financial factors, stock portfolios, and their interactions. We evaluate iQUANT through a formal user study, two case studies, and expert interviews, using a real stock market dataset consisting of 3000 stocks × 6000 days × 56 factors.

We propose a local adversarial disentangling network (LADN) for facial makeup and de-makeup. Central to our method are multiple and overlapping local adversarial discriminators in a content-style disentangling network for achieving local detail transfer between facial images, with the use of asymmetric loss functions for dramatic makeup styles with high-frequency details. Existing techniques do not demonstrate or fail to transfer high-frequency details in a global adversarial setting, or train a single local discriminator only to ensure image structure consistency and thus work only for relatively simple styles. Unlike others, our proposed local adversarial discriminators can distinguish whether the generated local image details are consistent with the corresponding regions in the given reference image in cross-image style transfer in an unsupervised setting. Incorporating these technical contributions, we achieve not only state-of-the-art results on conventional styles but also novel results involving complex and dramatic styles with high-frequency details covering large areas across multiple facial features. A carefully designed dataset of unpaired before and after makeup images is released at https://georgegu1997.github.io/LADN-project-page.